An Overextended Seasick Holiday

My weight loss program finally bore results. Over the last six days I have lost close to three kilograms of my weight.

Three years ago in a bout of extreme unhappiness at work I succumbed to gastric flu. It was hell on earth. Well at least for me. You definitely should not compare my plight to those victims of torture. The doctor told me then that I have to be careful from overexerting myself otherwise a relapse will occur.

One year passed. Two years passed. Coming onto the third year and my old nemesis Monsieur Sneaky Gastroenteritis aka Gastric Flu just had to pay me a visit again. It came in the middle of the day on Wednesday while I was at work. I shall not describe my ordeals but suffice to say that it involves many retching, throwing up, muscle pains, joint pains, eyeball pains and monstrous head pains. I have had zero appetite, and anyway whatever went in went out the same way, hence the weight loss.

I couldn't even make my ginger drink. So on Thursday I went to see a chinese doctor. Not the usual chinese physician that I normally go to but somewhere nearer my house. I figured since it is a branded establishment, I couldn't have gone wrong. But wrong I was. The chinese physician barely speaks english and my limited mandarin reduced my complains to something like "Me headache. Me threw up." She didn't ask me where exactly my headache was (which I could easily point out) and she didn't say anything else. After a one minute pause staring at the ceiling she wrote me a prescription for a seven day worth of powdered herbs. Thank you Dr Qi. I have by now thrown away your packets of herbs along with your name card down the rubbish chute.

So off I went for a shiatsu, hoping that it would cure me like the last time it did. But the masseuse was hell bent on murdering me. She pressed on my back until it turned blue black.

So off I went again to the nearby western doctor, hoping that this man might just cure me. What a relief to have a doctor really asking all the necessary details that inspire trust and confidence. And I must admit I enjoyed the shock on his face when my temperature reading registered a 39.5 degree Celsius. He said I looked well for someone running such a high fever. As always, I took that as a compliment and thanked him.

I left with three different packets of multi-coloured tablets, which I popped at regular intervals for the next few days. Still, my world only made sense from a horizontal perspective all the way till Sunday. I'd just need to stand up for more than two minutes and the world would start to spin and my knees would start to tremble, and I had to quickly lie down again.

Now I'm always in the belief that things happen for a purpose, that every event is supposed to be a teacher of some sort, that everything counts. But for the past five days I've been bedridden I still have no clue what this event can possibly teach me. That the earth is a planet spinning on its own axis? I knew that long time ago. That George Dubya Bush has extremely large nostrils? I knew that too. Still, if there's one good thing to be plucked out of this it is that I have lost quite a fair amount of weight. But my skin looks ghastly and sallow. Even looking at my own image in the mirror gives me headache.

Since it adds to my nausea I have not been reading and since bright lights pained me I had not been able to be in front of the monitor for too long. The amount of time spent lying down has made me notice several things, like:
1. Why do the upper halves and lower halves numbers on my clock faced inward and outward respectively?
2. Why do I have so many papers in my room?
3. What is so great about Crumpler bags? They're ugly and totally uncool and I hate their scrawny logo.
4. CDs when stacked together appear transparent when seen from the side.
5. Why does NTUC and Cold Storage stock only sour dragonfruits but Meidiya always manage to get good sweet ones?
6. The indescribable high level of noise pollution by the construction sites all surrounding my apartment.
7. Do mosquitos have willies?
8. Do snakes have willies?
9. How do chickens do it?
10. Why don't humans just lay eggs?
11. If Bach was still alive today, will he be as handsome as Jack Nicholson?

And then my friends had to tell me that there was a swell coming down on Sunday and that they were going up to Malaysia. That was it, I thought heaven was mocking me. Here I am down with pain and surf has to be up! I was almost so very tempted to go up in my state because hell, what is a fever after you get STOKED! But since I thought I might just die this time if I go in the water I had to abstain myself, otherwise my folks would blame me for dying a stupid death then I will never be able to forgive myself. Thus I was more than happy when I got the report that surf was barely there. Heaven is kind to me after all.

By Sunday I could bear it no more and booked an appointment with my usual chinese doc. I waited at his practice by midday. But he was on extended house calls and arrived only at 14:30. I waited for so long that subsequent patients needed just to pop their heads to see if I was still around to know if the doc had arrived. Thank god I am so used to waiting for waves for hours that two and a half hour wait for salvation was a short wait comparatively.

When finally the doc arrived I almost jumped to hug him. After checking on my tongue, my pulses, my ears, my skin and my eyes he immediately administered acupuncture treatment on me. Three needles on the head and three on my legs. I thought I was going to die when the first three needles went into my head. The needles were thin as hell but had felt so huge when entering the skin of my head. I imagined huge droplets of blood pooling on my skull already. I didn't dare move during the whole ordeal. But the doc reassured me that the healing process was at work. And when he took the needles away, not one drop of blood was spilled.

Apparently the doc was moved by my two and a half hour wait and had waived the acupuncture fee. I was more than happy to pay because he had been a great doc to me all these years and had helped me cure many strange ailments that would otherwise require surgical incisions as advised by some other western doctors. But he insisted so I just paid for my medicine.

After the acupuncture I could finally walk okay and finally today my appetite is back although the slight dizziness remains. I could sit straight as well. So I no longer need to watch television from an angle and look at my laptop monitor at an angle. The world starts to look right again.

What I started to feel though, is extreme itch. And that I started to get overly emotional over small things. The itch are all over my legs and hands. It could be due to my excessive perspiring but chinese medicine equates itch with toxin being expelled from the body and I like to think it that way. The emotional part was when I realised that I was laughing and crying over some cheesey Japanese drama within minutes of each other. I laughed when I saw how blue the sky was. I mean, I was not merely happy but I was laughing loudly for a minute or two.

I know some of you have told me that my sanity has been on the questionable side since I entered the wrong side of 17 but maybe this time the fever did it. Well, allow me to correct myself. Since I had been brought up to not blame myself, I shall pin the blame on that flared nostril Dubya Bush. He did it. He caused all these misery to happen to me. I feel better already.